Event-aware precise dynamic slicing for automatic debugging of Android applications

Abstract

Dynamic slicing aims to find the program statements that affect the values computed at some point of interest (i.e., a particular statement or variable) under a given program input. It is an enabling technique for many software engineering tasks (e.g., program understanding and debugging). Due to Android’s event-driven nature, dynamic slicing for Android is more challenging than that for traditional Java programs. Its asynchronous events drive the execution of an app through inter-component communications. These non-deterministic user events often yield a large search space when applying existing dynamic slicing techniques, which introduce redundant statements into the resulting slice. We present ESDroid, an Event-aware dynamic Slicing technique for AnDroid applications. The novelty of our approach lies in the combination of segment-based delta debugging and backward dynamic slicing to narrow the search space to produce precise slices for Android. Our experiment across 38 apps shows that ESDroid can help with slicing buggy code from exception program points. We compare the effectiveness of ESDroid with the state-of-the-art dynamic slicing tools (AndroidSlicer and Mandoline). ESDroid outperforms both tools by reporting up to 72% fewer spurious statements than AndroidSlicer, and 50% fewer than Mandoline in the resulting slice (the number of instructions to be examined).